Adrian Johns (academic)

Adrian Dominic Sinclair Johns (born 19 October 1965 ^[1] ) is a British-born academic. He earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992. ^[2] He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2001, ^[3] and was appointed the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History. ^[4] He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012. ^[5]

Johns is best known for his works on the history of information, particularly The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ^[6] and Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. ^[7]

Johns met Alison Winter at Cambridge in 1987, and the two married in 1992. ^[8] She died in 2016. ^[9]

Eisenstein-Johns Debate

In 2002, Johns was involved in a debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein in the American Historical Review over the degree to which printing was necessarily an agent of change (which Eisenstein had argued) or, as Johns claimed, a vehicle of change which carried messages that were mostly shaped by outside social forces. ^{[10] [11]}

Selected bibliography

• Johns, Adrian. The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. ISBN   9780226821481.
• Johns, Adrian. Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. ISBN   0393341801.
• Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN   9780226401188.
• Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN   9780226401218.

References

1. "Adrian Johns Curriculum Vitae". University of Chicago. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
2. "Adrian Johns". University of Chicago. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
3. "In Memoriam: Alison Winter". History of Science Society. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
4. "Adrian Johns". Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
5. "Adrian Johns". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
6. Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226401218.
7. Johns, Adrian (2010). Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226401188.
8. "Remembering Alison Winter". University of Chicago. 16 November 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
9. "Alison Winter, AB'87, historian of the mind, 1965–2016". 23 June 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
10. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (2002). "An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited". American Historical Review. 107 (1): 87–105.
11. Johns, Adrian (2002). "How to Acknowledge a Revolution". American Historical Review. 107 (1): 106–125.